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The History of the Providence of Being Struck First in the Process of Restoration

Just before Jesus passed away on the cross that was dripping with his blood, he said, “My Father, my Father, why have You forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46) At the end of this prayer, he said, “It is finished.” (John 19:30) He said, “It is finished,” not because he wanted to say that he had realized the ideal world. What he meant by this statement was that he had carried out the determination he had made during his thirty-year preparation period: “If my path becomes tragic, then I will do such and such.” This statement is not to be taken as something joyful; it was his expression of his sad heart to all of humanity. We have to understand that this was his last Will, which he spoke to the ignorant people out of his grieving heart.

Humanity has longed for the day when they could pioneer Jesus’ internal path of sorrow and be able to say, “I have realized everything.” You have to understand that this is the day of the returning resurrection. You have to understand this clearly.

Because the course of the crucifixion is the way Jesus fought with the satanic world, Christians all over the world today are following this example. Heaven reclaims after having been hit first. The people had betrayed him. Even the twelve apostles denied him, yet it was these twelve disciples that Jesus came to visit after he was resurrected from death. God takes things back after they have been hit once. St. Stephen, who believed in Jesus, was stoned to death. When St. Stephen was killed, God was able to claim St. Paul. In the same way that Jesus reclaimed the disciples who had earlier betrayed him, Jesus performed the powers of resurrection and took Saul at a time when the followers of Jesus were being killed. In other words, he took him after suffering a blow. Moreover, after he was renamed Paul, Saul took blows in place of the twelve disciples. Who would have thought that Paul, who suffered plenty of persecution and mistreatment, would become the most important apostle and establish the foundation for Christianity?

Who struck Jesus? The Roman soldiers and the Israelites struck Jesus. The Romans took the initiative. For this reason, because the disciples of Jesus were supposed to restore through indemnity the blows that Jesus took, they had to go into Rome and be persecuted in his place.

Because there remained the task to restore through indemnity the blows that the twelve apostles, seventy followers, and the multitudes took on behalf of the people, Rome was not allowed to collapse right away.

After the period of the Roman Empire and feudal society, when the Catholic church was at the height of its power, Luther challenged the church through the religious Reformation movement, and the church struck him and the movement down. Protestantism, which suffered these blows, crossed the Pacific, and created a new culture, it built the America of today. The external Canaan on the world level was established through those Christian groups who had been chased out.

Now the time has come when the society in Israel has taken on the form of a democratic nation. Heaven will seek another group of people to take the blow once again. This is a transition period in history. History has been seeking the group of people who will take the blows. This is the time when groups who will be struck and chased out must emerge among the churches and democratic nations. The group that is being chased out will have a different ideology and mind-set than the conventional one. Why? The ideology of Jesus is not the ideology of the earth. It is the ideology of the Kingdom of Heaven. It is fundamentally different from any ideology found on the earth. We know through our study of history that the people who try to live according to this new ideology will come to the surface through a course of great changes in heaven and earth, because Jesus founded the ideology.

What kind of group of people will appear at that moment? In the concluding period of history, a group of faithful people must appear who follow the footsteps of Jesus’ path toward Golgotha, a group which has been blessed by Heaven. A group must emerge who will retrace this inescapable path toward the hill of Golgotha, even if they are persecuted and driven out. Therefore, we must remember that a denomination must appear that shoulders the burden of Golgotha not on the level of Jesus, an individual, but on the level of Christianity or a church. Jesus gained what he was supposed to gain after first being struck. Since he was beaten by Rome, he took Rome. Because he pushed forward in time the movements of restoring the church, the nation and the world, he walked the individual path of Golgotha, in which he suffered blows on the individual level. Accordingly, there must emerge a religious group today that takes the blows on the level of the church and walks the path of Golgotha. A people must appear who walk the path of Golgotha on the level of a people. This is the formula course to reach Heaven in the last days.